Written by:
Purandar Das The landscape of IT and cybersecurity has shifted over the last few years with remote work and cloud infrastructure integration. This has grown the attack surface for organizations and requires new solutions to mitigate the additional risk. While they address the threat, these solutions have increased the overall workload for staff to manage and oversee these solutions.
These solutions are not the most cost-effective way to mitigate threats as they often only have a few functionalities and, in some cases, overlap with other point solutions. This redundancy is inefficient in both implementation and operations. Finding new solutions to meet multiple needs and streamline processes is essential for cost-effectiveness and minimizing staff workloads.
Assessing Your Gaps
Before even starting to find new solutions, organizations need to understand where their technological gaps are. Organizations that fail to do this will continue to propagate the problem with additional overlapping solutions that only add burden on an already overstressed workforce. In the long run, this costs the organization time and money. Identifying your gaps helps you understand what needs exist so you can select the best fit solution to meet the broadest number of needs possible. This helps reduce the complexity of multiple disparate point solutions.
Poor Use of Funds
When organizations fail to assess their gaps before implementing new technologies thoroughly, they waste money. These solutions often don’t fully meet their needs, they require additional cost in point solutions to support, or they find their new technologies deliver the same functionality that other existing solutions already do, bringing little extra to the table.
Every different solution purchased that does not simplify the architecture or streamline operations is a waste of resources. When redundant solutions are located, they should be eliminating other systems and workflows that exist independently. Eliminating these point solutions helps to reduce the time employees spend on management and monitoring, allowing them to focus on more meaningful projects to improve security organizationally rather than maintaining the status quo.
Supporting Your Workforce
Assessing the gaps is also about optimizing and streamlining your workflows and operations. With the pandemic, security staff had to work extra hard to secure new resources accessed remotely or moved into the cloud. Data still needed to be as secure as when it was in the office. By increasing the attack surface, teams had to work even harder to deliver on this.
Unfortunately, staff size is not growing to accommodate the increased needs. With a shortage of 2.7 million skilled cybersecurity professionals, adding more staff to spread out the load was not easy. Instead, teams are getting burned out and, in many cases, leaving for positions that will better accommodate work-life balance.
Identifying Needs
Adopting a new security solution is no small undertaking and has wide-reaching implications for the organization. Doing this requires forethought and assessment to make sure that the tool meets your needs and is a good fit for the business. When addressing these needs, you should consider the following questions:
- Does it deliver similar capabilities met by one or more existing solutions?
- Does it address existing security and compliance needs or future plans?
- Can it integrate with existing workflows?
Each of these questions will help you determine whether a solution will be a good fit long-term or further complicate your existing architecture.
Overlapping Solutions
When reviewing the existing infrastructure, it is essential to identify all of the functionality of the solutions that are already in place. When implementing point solutions, it is easy to create areas with functional overlap. This happens when multiple point solutions cover all of the same functionality delivered by another solution.
When these situations arise, you need to determine what solution will best simplify the architecture and operations. The best solutions are those that eliminate redundant capabilities or those that require significant manual effort to work. With the growth of infrastructure, especially in the cloud, the need for automation is essential for keeping up with the technological sprawl without creating security gaps or overburdening staff.
Existing Needs
The easiest way to identify gaps in your security organization is to assess existing compliance needs. Compliance frameworks such as SoX, HIPAA, and GDPR are very explicit about the functionality to be implemented. Identifying areas where your business does not align can help define the gaps you must address. Even though these frameworks define the functionality, the means of achieving compliance is rarely specific such as naming a particular product or type of product. Determining the best fit solution often requires leveraging existing audits to help determine gaps.
Even though compliance helps set security baselines, it does not always indicate the optimal security stance your organization can achieve. Mature organizations may have an existing security roadmap outlining goals and directions. Evolving organizations may require a more in-depth cross-departmental assessment to determine future plans. This assessment requires an executive owner to drift the process and push cross-departmental efforts to be effective.
Bridging the Gaps
Sotero is so much more than a data encryption solution. It is a complete data security solution that integrates access management and privacy capabilities to deliver data security, change management, and access control all under one umbrella. The Sotero platform can help eliminate redundant and manual security functionality by integrating existing solutions and automation.
Sotero allows you to cut costs by minimizing the existing sprawl of security products by allowing you to manage your data security ecosystem through a single-pane-of-glass. Intelligent automation guarantees that new assets and applications added to the security fabric inherit security capabilities, reducing the load on your staff and simplifying operational overhead.
Schedule a demo today to learn more about how the Sotero Data Security Platform can help you make the most of your existing IT security workforce.